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'Google says I'm a dead physicist': is the biggest search engine broken?
- louthy 2y agoEven a stopped clock will be right twice per day. Google will be right about this eventually.
- talldayo 2y ago> When I searched my name, there it was: a picture of my smiling face next to the text “Tom Faber was a physicist and publisher, and he was a university lecturer at Cambridge for 35 years”. Good grief. Pal, you've got a name with 8 identifying alphanumeric characters. Of course it is going to collide with other identities on the openly-indexed internet.
- 8organicbits 2y agoThe article isn't about a name collision, it's about the photo: > confused pictures of my face with the biography of another man who shared my name
- brookst 2y agoIsn’t that name collision?
- iainmerrick 2y agoIf it were a simple name collision in the way the original commenter seemed to mean, you’d search for your name, and see the photo and biography of a different person. The article writer searched for his name, and found his photo attached to somebody else’s biography. That’s an incorrect search result.
- deaddodo 2y agoNo, he found another person's biography near his profile photo for his X blurb. They were in distinctly different content bubbles, even if it visually looked similar.
- advael 2y agoThis reading isn't supported by the text
- kevin_thibedeau 2y agoToo bad Tom Faber is dead so we'll never know the truth.
- brookst 2y agoOne day we’ll understand the mystery surrounding the death of all Tom Fabers at once.
- stefan_ 2y agoAs this article rightly points out, people don't tend to care for why your lossy abstraction is making them out to be dead.
- 8organicbits 2y agoTo me, a name collision is when two or more entities share the same name or ID. What's claimed here is that Google was showing the photo of one person on the bio of another person. That's an identity consolidation error, where two unrelated people are treated as one. The name collision presumably caused the identity consolidation error, but you can have name collisions without identity consolidation errors.
- tonynator 2y agoThat's name collision. The photo is chosen based on the name.
- jeffparsons 2y agoSo Google is presenting summary information in a way that very much implies comprehension, but without any comprehension of context — i.e. a name collision is enough to throw them off and result in unrelated pictures and bio being smashed together? Seems pretty irresponsible of Google to do that. And also, just... kind of lame. Google is slowly but surely changing their image from "tech wizard" to "kind of a joke", and they have nobody but themselves to blame.
- surfingdino 2y agoChatGPT and any other LLM does the same thing, no?
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoRight, which is why their content generation has gotten a reputation for being slop and their answers have become synonymous with hallucination.
- tonynator 2y agoIt's AI-generated, like anything AI-generated you should not assume it's totally accurate. I would support some kind of disclaimer if it's not already there.
- scottlamb 2y agoWhen I search for "Tom Faber", I expect to get results relating to a bunch of Tom Fabers. When I see a knowledge panel result, I expect everything within it to relate to a single entity, regardless of name collisions. If it doesn't, that's incorrect. If it's too hard to disambiguate, it's better to not have the knowledge panel at all. That said, I did this search just now. https://imgur.com/a/zEjrfte https://imgur.com/a/zEjrfte The top organic result is the author's X bio and has his profile pic in the search results page. To the right of it (across a gutter) is the knowledge panel about the physicist. I could see how one might get confused, but the X profile pic is just near the knowledge panel, not actually in it. So if this is what the author saw, I don't agree with the article. It'd be nice if he included an actual screenshot of what he's describing, instead of the cute "Why is Google..." thing.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoRight, which is why reasonable levels of humility and wisdom would keep an organization from expanding their mission from indexing documents to providing automated answers to questions.
- coliveira 2y agoTheir real mission is to sell ads on web pages. For this reason, they feel entitled to show web search as well as AI hallucinations.
- advael 2y agoYes, it's likely an unmitigable problem with trying to aggregate information in this way. That's why the value proposition of a search engine is that it presents information from primary sources, rather than trying to summarize it. Finding resources on other people with the same name is unsurprising, having the AI conflate you as it presents an aggregate is misleading, and enough so to be a real problem
- jjulius 2y ago> Google provides a feedback form to resolve this type of bug. I filled it in several times, but it made no difference. At this point they're certainly allowed to be surprised, annoyed (pick whatever word you want to describe it) that it's still happening. No need to be snarky, pal.
- fortran77 2y agoI read the article and what I understood that a "knowledge panel/info box" popped up with this living man's picutre and a note saying he was deceased. It wasn't just an issue of several results coming up for a person with a common name.
- jfoster 2y agoIs Google not able to predict the likelihood of a name collision as you just did? Is your solution to just continue showing incorrect information?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- DocTomoe 2y agoI once switched to Google, one day in '98, when they were basically ad-free, with good results. I once switched away from Google, one day in '23, when the first seven results for many queries were 'sponsored', and shitty. These days, I let LLMs answer most of my questions. They are sufficiently easy to use. For regular surfing, I rely on Kagi. Both services are pay for play, but my lifetime is not unlimited, and can be spent better than shifting through advertisements.
- LeoPanthera 2y agoYou've got to be careful about which LLM. I asked Microsoft Copilot for advice about staying in Paris, and then as a followup in the same thread, asked about navigation apps. It started recommending apps that work well... in New York City. If Copilot can't retain context, in the same thread, after a single message, then it's useless. ChatGPT, which apparently Copilot is based on, didn't have this problem. And from the linked article I have just discovered "Perplexity", which looks a bit like ChatGPT only plugged into a search engine. ChatGPT is also plugged into a search engine, so maybe it's plugged in... more? Not sure. If anyone working at Perplexity is reading this, please add an "about" page to tell me what the site actually does. Nowhere I could find would explain. Everything assumes you already know, and I eventually had to go to Wikipedia to find out. If anyone makes an LLM which only knows what's in Wikipedia, and doesn't hallucinate anything else, they would clean up.
- smackeyacky 2y agoWhy not just use the search bar in Wikipedia and call it good?
- LeoPanthera 2y agoBecause "searching for an encyclopedia article" and "asking questions about a branch of knowledge" are fundamentally different approaches. In theory, an LLM that was a talking Wikipedia would not be limited to giving you knowledge from just one page, it could extract multiple pieces of information from multiple articles to answer the precise question you had, and could accept follow-up questions on the same or similar topics.
- linearrust 2y agoMy condolences.
- bell-cot 2y agoYes, it's broken. But when Google was young and wonderful, the web was a relative paradise, and rich with truthful (or at least well-intended) information. Now, the web is mostly an SEO-optimized, Terminal-Stage Capitalist hellscape. Even the very best talents and intentions would find it extremely difficult to create a "good" search engine these days. I mostly use non-Google search now. Even when it ain't better, I can imagine that I'm boosting the "people looking for less-sucky-than-Google search" stats.
- Zambyte 2y ago> Now, the web is mostly an SEO-optimized I don't really think that's true. I think most of the web you find from Google is mostly SEO-optimized. There are a lot of web pages. And a lot of them, Google does not promote. I have had a really good experience with web search since I switched to Kagi last year. Like, I've genuinely been able to find things that I have been unable to find with other search engines.
- reboot81 2y agoThis is why I help my family and friends switch to ddg.gg https://spreadprivacy.com/is-duckduckgo-a-good-search-engine/ https://spreadprivacy.com/is-duckduckgo-a-good-search-engine...
- sircastor 2y agoYes, and it’s been broken for a long time. The crossroads of siting on one’s laurels and conflict of interest have resulted in Google’s results not being particularly good. The only reason they remain on top (IMO) is that the dynamics of search, how information is published, and how people discover new information are rapidly changing.
- cratermoon 2y agoAnd being a monopoly. Don't forget Google's monopolistic practices.
- surfingdino 2y ago[flagged]
- tom_ 2y agoI somewhat disagree. By way of example, when I search for "unreal engine UObject" I would expect to get the documentation page for Unreal Engine's UObject class. (https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/API/Runtime/CoreUObject/UObject https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/...) Google search was at one point excellent for this sort of thing! But, today, when I search for that, the UObject documentation page is nowhere to be found. It is still OK for Python stuff. But it used to be good for everything!
- Zambyte 2y agoIt's fine that they ignore reports that they are unified creating panel associating unrelated information? That wholly sounds like a Google problem to me.
- surfingdino 2y agoThat's a manifestation of fear at management level. They fear punishment from Wall Street for not implementing an AI strategy so they force their teams to "do something", with predictable results, i.e. garbage produces by LLMs indiscriminately recombining data.
- nullc 2y agoThere is plenty of great information that google is just unable or unwilling to return these days which it returned just fine in yesteryears. I'm not talking about political bullshit or culture whatever, though Alphabet has serious problems there too, but just boring stuff like technical documentation that doesn't even have a lot of obvious spam interference.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- vannevar 2y agoBroken if you're trying to search for things, working great if you're an advertiser buying traffic.
- riiii 2y agoIt has been intentionally vandalized. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
- AnthonyMouse 2y agoThis implies that someone else could just do what Google used to do, create a better search engine, and eat their lunch. They might not make as much money per-user, but for all search engines other than Google, their biggest problem is not revenue per user, it's how to get more users. "Have a better search engine" is a pretty good advantage there.
- gpspake 2y agoI use kagi exclusively now except for shopping and images. Anytime I use Google, now I'm disgusted with how bad the results are. The bar seems really low to supplant Google search.
- appplication 2y agoThe secondary problem here - one that is both larger and not something Kagi can solve - is that so much content on the internet is just low quality garbage. Even supposedly crowdsourced info from Reddit is astroturfed to hell by social media marketing firms. So what good is it finding something that’s highly relevant to my search query if it’s just garbage anyways. There are just so few sources of meaningful information, and essentially no way to reliably differentiate them from drivel.
- riiii 2y agoIn the linked article they talk about how Google reverted their crap detector to intentionally feed users low quality results. But you're still right that there's so much garbage out there. Google had it largely under control though.
- mrjin 2y agoI depended a lot on Google search. Since Google start moving to the dark side, I was wondering when could I remove the dependency. It turned out the dependency removed itself.
- paulmd 2y agoYes, definitely. This is the reason the summary box is telling you to eat glue - that’s what the top search results say, and the LLM dutifully summarizes. Google has fucked up search so badly it is fucking up their AI ambitions. Very karmic. It’s probably basically google-bombing for the modern era underneath. But the point is that search is now so broken that it can be pretty trivially google-bombed in 2024, at the exact moment the world needs it for RAG.
- Terr_ 2y ago> Nayak apologised, saying the panels were created automatically using algorithms and sometimes they messed up: “These are the kinds of things we’re constantly improving.” A process or invention may be "constantly improving" by small and meaningless amounts without ever reaching a point that offsets the damage it does over its lifetime. "Our toaster now uses 5% less asbestos, and we're passing on the savings to you!"
- OkGoDoIt 2y agoI renovated and reopened an old theater in San Francisco years ago. Google maps still lists my theater as “Chinatown's 1925 cinematic home to kung fu & opera films is closed but reopens for film festivals.” Which has not been accurate for a decade. I’ve claimed the location and updated everything I can of the Google maps description but this seems editorialized and there’s no place to edit it or mark it as invalid. I’ve tried reporting the listing multiple times but there’s no way to get a response from a human or get any changes made. I know it’s not that related to the article but Google is broken and so many little ways, it’s not surprising it adds up to a slowly crumbling quality overall.
- kylecazar 2y agoThat sounds so annoying. Could it possibly be something they source upstream from somewhere else on the internet? I.e if you search verbatim "Chinatown's 1925 cinematic home to kung fu & opera films is closed but reopens for film festivals.", there are two websites that list your business with that exact description. Either they got it from Google, or Google got it from them. It might be worth claiming it on those sites and changing as well in the off chance it's the latter.
- yosito 2y agoI have a relatively uncommon name. Way back in the beginning Google thought I was an 18th century English criminal. Then for a while in the 2010s I gave a shit about SEO and got my own website ranked first for my name. Then I quit caring and last time I checked, Google thinks I'm an 18th century criminal again.
- CRConrad 2y agoThat's the same fallacy as the author of the article: No, Google doesnt “think you are an 18th century English criminal”, any more than it thinks the author “was a dead physicist”. It knows that he, the 18th century English criminal, was an 18th century English criminal. Just like it knows that the other guy, the dead physicist, was a dead physicist. It isnt talking about you (or the OP author); it's not as if you two are the only ones ever to bear your names.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- eternal_braid 2y agohttps://you.com/search https://you.com/search should be more popular.